“The fact is, my mother had left home before they could have reached Lonsdale,” interposed Vincent; “but my sister would take care of them equally well. They are all safe. A note came this morning announcing their arrival. My mother,” said the young man, hastily, “returns almost immediately. It will make no difference to the strangers.”
“I am sure Susan will make them comfortable, and the beds would be well aired,” said Mrs. Vincent; “but I had sudden occasion to leave home, and did not even know of it till the night before. My dear,” she said, with hesitation, “did you think Mrs. Hilyard would know? I brought Susan’s note to show you,” she added, laying down that simple performance in which Susan announced the receipt of Arthur’s letter, and the subsequent arrival of “a governess-lady, and the most beautiful girl that ever was seen.” The latter part of Susan’s hurried note, in which she declared this beautiful girl to be “very odd—a sort of grown-up baby,” was carefully abstracted by the prudent mother.
The strange woman before them took up the note in both her hands and drank it in, with an almost trembling eagerness. She seemed to read over the words to herself again and again with moving lips. Then she drew a long breath of relief.
“Miss Smith is the model of a governess-lady,” she said, turning with a composure wonderfully unlike that eagerness of anxiety to Mrs. Vincent again—“she never writes but on her day, whatever may happen; and yesterday did not happen to be her day. Thank you; it is Christian charity. You must not be any loser meantime, and we must arrange these matters before you go away. This is not a very imposing habitation,” she said, glancing round with a movement of her thin mouth, and comic gleam in her eye—“but that makes no difference, so far as they are concerned. Mr. Vincent knows more about me than he has any right to know,” continued the strange woman, turning her head towards him for the moment with an amused glance—“a man takes one on trust sometimes, but a woman must always explain herself to a woman: perhaps, Mr. Vincent, you will leave us together while I explain my circumstances to your mother?”
“Oh, I am sure it—it is not necessary,” said Mrs. Vincent, half alarmed; “but, Arthur, you were to ask—”
“What were you to ask?” said Mrs. Hilyard, laying her hand with an involuntary movement upon a tiny note lying open on the table, to which Vincent’s eyes had already wandered.
“The fact is,” he said, following her hand with his eyes, “that my mother came up to inquire about someone called Fordham, in whom she is interested. Lady Western knows him,” said Vincent, abruptly, looking in Mrs. Hilyard’s face.
“Lady Western knows him. You perceive that she has written to ask me about him this morning. Yes,” said Mrs. Hilyard, looking at the young man, not without a shade of compassion. “You are quite right in your conclusions; poor Alice and he were in love with each other before she married Sir Joseph. He has not been heard of for a long time. What do you want to know, and how is it he has showed himself now?”
“It is for Susan’s sake,” cried Mrs. Vincent, interposing; “oh, Mrs. Hilyard, you will feel for me better than anyone—my only daughter! I got an anonymous letter the night before I left. I am so flurried, I almost forget what night it was—Tuesday night—which arrived when my dear child was out. I never kept anything from her in all her life, and to conceal it was dreadful—and how we got through that night—”
“Mother, the details are surely not necessary now,” said her impatient son. “We want to know what are this man’s antecedents and his character—that is all,” he added, with irrestrainable bitterness.
Mrs. Hilyard took up her work, and pinned the long coarse seam to her knee. “Mrs. Vincent will tell me herself,” she said, looking straight at him with her amused look. Of all her strange peculiarities, the faculty of amusement was the strangest. Intense restrained passion, anxiety of the most desperate kind, a wild will which would pause at nothing, all blended with and left room for this unfailing perception of any ludicrous possibility. Vincent got up hastily, and, going to the window, looked out upon the dismal prospect of Salem, throwing its shabby shadow upon those dreary graves. Instinctively he looked for the spot where that conversation must have been held which he had overheard from the vestry window; it came most strongly to his mind at that moment. As his mother went through her story, how Mr. Fordham had come accidentally to the house—how gradually they had admitted him to their friendship—how, at last, Susan and he had become engaged to each other—her son stood at the window, following in his mind all the events of that evening, which looked so long ago, yet was only two or three evenings back. He recalled to himself his rush to the telegraph office; and again, with a sharp stir of opposition and enmity, recalled, clear as a picture, the railway-carriage just starting, the flash of light inside, the face so clearly evident against the vacant cushions. What had he to do with that face, with its eagle outline and scanty long locks? Somehow, in the meshes of fate he felt himself so involved that it was impossible to forget this man. He came and took his seat again with his mind full of that recollection. The story had come to a pause, and Mrs. Hilyard sat silent, taking in with her keen eyes every particular of the gentle widow’s character, evidently, as Vincent could see, following her conduct back to those springs of gentle but imprudent generosity and confidence in what
